Tag: Metcalfe– Robert

Wi-Fi

In 1941, Hollywood actress Hedy Lamarr devised a system and submitted a patent for radio signals that changed frequencies.

Background

Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler (Heidi Lamar) was born in Vienna. She is most famous as the first woman to appear nude in a mainstream film. In the same movie, she was also the first woman to fake an orgasm. If that wasn’t enough, she wrote the patent for her spread spectrum technology with orchestra director George Antheil.

In an age where Tesla was still alive and Edison only recently died nobody took the Hollywood bombshell and her band director seriously. Nevertheless, their invention eventually proved as important as anything the Wizard of Menlo Park, Edison, or The Man Who Invented the 20th Century, Tesla, ever released.

Eventually, in 1985, the US Federal Communications Commission opened bandwidth for unlicensed use. Wireless phones followed as a common use case. Subsequently, bathroom was never the same.

More significantly, in 1991, NCR invented a wireless data standard named WaveLAN for use in retail. WaveLAN extended Ethernet, the wired standard invented by Robert Metcalfe at Xerox PARC, over radio waves.

Wireless Ethernet, Wi-Fi

Eventually, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) — the standards committee for everything electronic – realized the need to beam data over radio waves, not wires.

Vic Hayes, chair of the IEEE, worked on the 802.11 standard released in 1997. Specifically, 802.11 is the wireless extension of wired Ethernet, invented by Metcalfe.

In 1997, a consortium of equipment makers created the Wi-Fi alliance and branded wireless ethernet (802.11), as Wi-Fi, trademarking the name.

Today, Wi-Fi is everywhere from individual homes to businesses. Walk into a coffee shop in Manhattan and they’ll offer Wi-Fi. Similarly, walk into a coffee shop in Hanoi and they’re also likely to offer Wi-Fi. Consumers expect water to be sold but there is a worldwide expectation for free wireless internet access.

Ethernet Networking

Ethernet is a computer networking protocol. Before Ethernet, computers were connected using a hodgepodge of various systems, a digital Tower of Babel.

Background

Bob Metcalfe invented Ethernet at Xerox PARC. However, Xerox failed to commercialize the technology. Metcalfe left and worked on his own Digital (see minicomputers) and Intel to set Ethernet as a networking standard. Eventually, the industry adopted Ethernet as a standard labeling it IEEE 802.3.

Ethernet’s advantage is that it is radically simpler and cheaper than prior “better” methods.

Think of information flowing from one computer to another. Information is broken down into small pieces, called packets, then sent on their way. The receiving computer reassembles the packets. For example, this page is a series of packets. A server broke it into packets then your computer or phone reassembled it.

Other networking methods went to great lengths to avoid the packets from colliding. Ethernet simply allows them to occasionally collide, which means they disappear, then resends when that happens.

Think of Ethernet as an enormous highway with little traffic control where cars, carrying information, sometimes collide and destroy one another. When this happens, the sender simply generates and resents a new packet. This was vastly less complicated and less expensive than trying to avoid collisions.

Ethernet Thrives After Xerox PARC

After Xerox PARC, in 1979, Metcalfe founded 3Com and formulated Metcalfe’s law, that computer networks become exponentially more useful with more nodes.

Metcalfe lost 3Com in a boardroom fight though the company left him extremely wealthy. Xerox made little or no money from Ethernet, but Metcalfe’s 3Com grew into a Fortune 500 company making him extremely wealthy.

Today, Wifi remains a wireless version of Ethernet.